Chuck(G)
25k Member
The title pretty much says it all. If you're willing to take on reading three of the old MO disks, contact me.
In BSDs the device giving access to the entire disk is one of the lettered devices. According to Wikipedia, it's the device ending in the letter 'c':Since NeXTStep only ever seems to offer you the partition in '/dev/od0a' for example instead of giving you just '/dev/od0' as-well as modern *nix's do. I tried 'dd'ing the '/dev/od0a' and while it seems to give you all the data off the disk, its not in a usable format for something like the emulator, and I am not sure if you can 'dd' it back to an MO disk or not. Don't have a known empty scratch disk yet.
https://www.nextcomputers.org/forums/index.php?msg=21548 said:While verifying that I had imaged the disks properly I noticed that I was missing files. Apparently tar is skipping a few because the filenames are too long. The supposed fix is
...according to this page but it seems that Tar on NeXTSTEP doesn't know what the E modifier stands for. It was apparently added to tar years after NeXTSTEP 3.3.Code:tar -Ecvf /archive.tar /source/folder
Edited: Adding insult to injury, it seems the latest releases of gnutar won't even configure on NeXTSTEP. Something about the shell being too old.
Edited: Ah right. Kb7sqi built gnutar for NeXTSTEP a while back. It's just not hosted locally in the file archive.
Reeks of Steve. It was shiny and new and was a hell of a gimmick. I'm sure the engineering department didn't like the idea either.That MO drive as the sole mass storage device was a "what the heck were they thinking?" thing for me.
Someone also suggested just trying to build ddrescue on the NeXT since GCC seems available. But I worry about whatever drivers lay underneath causing more issues than it may be worth for their custom interfaced MO drive... Might be worth a try if someone wants to give it a go though.
So its not just the motor board... There are about 4-5 boards sandwiched and folded over each other in that thing and all of them have electrolytic caps and they have all leaked by this point. I just opened mine up, got all the values and their height dimension, and ordered new caps as close as I could get...Connection claimed by NeXT for the Canon MO drive to be proprietary. From what I've read, most problems of non-functional MO drives stem from the motor control board, which is usually plagued by leaky capacitors. If anyone wants a repair guide for this thing, it's here.
For the semi-purists, apparently substituting a 3.5" SCSI MO drive preserves the spirit and works a lot faster.
Since my post was 10 years ago, I don't recall if the problem was ever solved or not. At any rate, I haven't received any other requests. I do recall contacting a NeXT-fanboi friend only to find that he'd gone the hard disk upgrade route. That MO drive as the sole mass storage device was a "what the heck were they thinking?" thing for me.
Good to know. I'm sorry this didn't work.Also tried a few other things as you suggested stepleton, and no the `c` or `h` (as someone else suggested trying) partitions does not work to capture the entire MO disk `od` devices
Can confirm Canon Diskfile 5001S will not read NeXT format cartridges. Because the NeXT OD interface is not "intelligent" it has the same kind of problem as ST412 type fixed disks; the embedded controller in the 5001S doesn't know the low level disk format of the NeXT controller.I just got a Canon Diskfile 5001S off ebay... I can't recall if anyone has tried a single sided NeXT disk in one of those, but it should be the same logical format AFAIK?
I'll have to remember to post back here on what I can do with the Canon Diskfile unless someone already knows it works, or doesn't work!